Patients suffering from a variety of diseases or other medical conditions receive medical treatment from physicians. Typically, a patient with a chronic disease must travel to the office of the physician, such as a hospital, clinic, or other medical setting (referred to herein as “clinical environments”), for check-ups with the physician. During the check-ups, the physician may perform a series of tests and examinations on the patient to monitor the progression of the disease. The physician may change one or more therapies or order diagnoses provided to the patient to correctly treat the disease based on the results of the tests and examinations. For example, the physician may change a medication, a dosage of a medication, order a test, and the like, based on the progression of the disease.
Medical decisions are generally limited by the amount of medical data that is available for examination. For example, typically the physician only has access to medical data that is obtained from the patient while the patient is in the clinical environment as well as self-reports by the patient. While the physician can have access to historical medical data, such as medical data obtained during previous visits to the physician, the total medical data available to the physician usually only represent a small fraction of the total time that the patient suffers from the disease.
The physician usually does not have access to medical data that is obtained when the patient is outside of the clinical environments, or may have limited access to such medical data. The cost and/or size of the equipment used by the physician to obtain medical data when the patient is in the clinical environment can be prohibitively expensive and/or large for a patient to take the equipment with him or her outside of the clinical environment.
As a result, the physician generally has a limited amount of data that is relevant to a patient's disease. While helpful, this medical data may not provide a complete enough picture of the disease state of the patient for efficient medical decision making. For example, the medical data usually does not contain information about the activities patients undergo during the day and how these activities are affected by drugs and disease. This also complicates the detection of changes or trends in the disease of the patient when the patient is outside of the clinical environment.
With the goal of improving patient outcomes while at the same time reducing patient care costs, the need exists for a system and method that can obtain and provide medical data of a patient and provide feedback to the patient all while the patient is outside of a clinical environment with equipment that is reasonable in cost and/or size.